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Topic: Feature Idea: Sensor Ghosts (Read 408 times)

Feature Idea: Sensor Ghosts

I've seen a mission or two where the designer added a number of grid-placed asteroids giving them "hidden from sensors" flags so they create a mass of noise on the radar. Placing all of these asteroids to create the appearance of randomness, as well as filling a large mission area can be tedious. I was hoping that the super-coders of the SCP team might be able to create some feature to make this easier. This could be simply added as another asteroid field option, but I suppose there might be times when a FREDder might want sensor ghosts even when no asteroid field is present, like in a nebula or something. In that case, perhaps a sexp might be the way to go.

Suggestions for what options might be included:

Number - obviouslyAppearance - Whether they should appear as grey, hostile, friendly, unknown, mixture or other.Dynamic - Whether one contact should always appear to be in the same location once it begins, or whether one should pop up, flash a few times, then disappear while another one pops up somewhere else.Absolute Vector - Whether the sensor ghosts should appear to only come from one particular direction, useful if you have a mission alongside an asteroid field.Spawn Cone - Use in conjunction with Absolute Vector to define the size of the ghosting region on radar.

Example: Mission will have player approach, enter, fly through, and exit an asteroid field containing sensor contacts. Absolute vector would be set at a direction ahead of the player. Spawn Cone would be something below 180 degrees, and number on contacts would be low. As the player approaches the field, a repeating event would use variables and distance checks to change the spawn cone to get wider and the number of contacts to be greater. As the player enters the field, the cone would increase beyond 180 degrees until it reaches 360, and the number of contacts would increase to the intended maximum. As the player approaches the far side of the field, the absolute vector would be flipped, so the direction would now be exactly opposite from the original. Then the contacts number and spawn cone would be reduced as the player exits the field.

Re: Feature Idea: Sensor Ghosts

This could be easily implemented in a script via dummy ships, incidentally. It wouldn't be a bad thing to have as a first-class feature, though, but if you have a particular use case in mind, I could script something up for you.

Re: Feature Idea: Sensor Ghosts

I'm just currently using the "invisible to sensors" + grid-placed asteroids method to add some immersion to asteroid fields in my FS-Port Augmented project, and it seemed somewhat tedious. I figured more people could benefit from a more well-rounded feature.